Hi Everyone! Today’s quick idea is for Jewelry making rather than paper crafting. Something different for a change!
Here is a quick explanation of how I made my own Stone Setting tool for jewelry using Faux Bone. If you’ve never heard of this, it is a product developed by Robert Dancik and usually used as a focal piece. He also uses it for pushing shapes into metal for those of us without a hydraulic press. But I came up with a different way of using it- as a custom tool to set stones!
I have a myriad of stone setting tools. The latest I just purchased are beautiful hand made ones by Chris at Lion Forge. I’m sure in the right hands they are miraculous 😉 . My hands still are terrible however at setting even with these gorgeous tools, however I hope to one day graduate to using them! I have watched and taken classes and still I have trouble getting a smooth, tight trap of the stone underneath without slipping and marring the metal or stone itself.
So I was looking around the studio one day trying to see if I had anything that was hard yet soft/non-marring that might work. I had already tried using brass rods that I smoothed and rounded over, and that was ok but still not perfect. And I was doing something with my new bench too that is made from a hard plastic, and then I remembered Faux Bone! I grabbed some and sawed a piece into a shape that I thought would work and that would fit in my hand. A jewelry saw was fine to cut the shape, and I used a file and my jool tool to finish the smoothing process. There is also a special edger for Faux Bone that gets rid of the sharp edge along the sides. I made a few different sizes and shapes and have used them successfully to set some bezels with stones and fused glass pendants.
So if you have any Faux Bone laying around and you are looking for a tool that won’t mar your metal. give it a try! If not you can find Faux Bone at Robert’s site or at CoolTools.
Here is the video where I show my tools. Sorry for the shakiness- I was hand holding my camera.